Post-modern turn in society requires its citizens to develop capacities to resituate their activities in collective unities and to successfully communicate their actions within these multiple local and global communities (Bruhn, 2005). In education, the concept of community continues to possess a positive image and also, the optimistic premises how communication technologies enable communities to grow have been widely discussed. However, to stay true to the complexity of novel social orderings here, in this research project underway questions are raised not for the validity of the early research on communities, but, for the capacities of their research scopes and methods used instead. It is argued here that instead of studying small-group interactions with the emphasis on the online learning environments only or; to merely concentrating in framing the ongoing activities from the outside, studies that may draw together larger-scale and longer-term (actor-sensitive) perspectives with a shift of focus in studying educational technologies, are requisite. This study aims to extend the early research on learning communities by bringing the full complexity of "the collective" (i.e. the meso-level; Jones et. al., 2006) more fully in the situation of inquiry with an equal focus on individual and collective aspects. Likewise, the aim is to extend from studying the use of communication technologies towards a more timely view on their presence in participants’ everyday activities of living (e.g. Hallnäs & Redström, 2002). Also, the aim is to develop qualitative methods that are capable in capturing the meso-level by elucidating the processes of change together with the patterns and stabilities in these situations (Clarke, 2005). Finally, this study seeks to contribute to designing for successful communal activities to flourish in technology-rich higher education as actor-sensitive practice that takes seriously the subjective stands and heterogeneous positions of the individuals’ in the contemporary collective practices as fundamentals to design (e.g. Wright & McCarthy; 2005).

The research will constitute two sub-studies that are conceptually and methodologically building upon each other. The research participants of Study 1 and Study 2 will be Finnish open university students. In Study 1 (n=60), the meso-level of collective activity is explored, including thus individual, collective and nonhuman elements (e.g. technologies) in the situations and, will include two terms of fieldwork. In Study 2 (n=60), together with the theoretical survey, the aim is to turn the descriptive analysis of Study 1 into prescriptive design variables and intervention choices for design interventions. The intervention conditions will vary between three sub-groups of the research participants. In order to make justice to the meso-level, multiple data collection methods will be used. To study "the individual", methods used for studying participants’ experiences in collective activities will be utilised and developed further over this study (Pöysä et al., 2003). To study "the collective", the research will employ ethnographic approach, applied for fieldwork in multi-sited, technology-rich fields of study (Pink, 2000). The data set will include textual, visual and discursive materials as well as interview and observation data. Also, the researcher as a full participant over the process of study will be carefully documented and reflected. In the analysis, to capture the processes of change, poly-vocal representations (Amit, 2000; Pöysä, 2006) will be used and developed further with respect to the meso-level of collective activity. To capture the patterns and stabilities, cartographical representations as situational maps, social worlds and positional maps will be produced. Mapping the different human and nonhuman elements will permit them to be disarticulated from their sites of production and, allowing them for further analytical bite (Clarke, 2005).

The results of this research project underway will advance theoretical and empirical understandings of the complex and heterogeneous communal activities emerging through contemporary, technology-rich learning orderings in higher education where individual, collective and nonhuman perspectives are tightly intermingled. Over the study, advanced qualitative methods that are capable in capturing this meso-level will be developed. Finally, through studying the true complexity of collective, this study will contribute to educational design for "possible futures" of successful communal learning activities to evolve in higher education context.